ZCZC
BFF-26
ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS-CONFLICT
Israel readies to raze Palestinian murder suspect’s home
JERUSALEM, Feb 10, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – The Israeli army said Sunday it had
started preparations to demolish the West Bank home of a Palestinian
suspected of killing an Israeli woman.
“Overnight, troops operated in Hebron, where the suspect in the murder of
Ori Ansbacher is from,” the army said in an English-language statement.
“During the operation, the troops surveyed the suspect’s house in order to
examine the possibility of its demolition.”
The suspect was arrested over the weekend and has not yet been charged.
The body of Ansbacher, 19, was found late Thursday in southeast Jerusalem,
and she was buried the next day in her Israeli settlement of Tekoa.
Israeli security forces arrested the suspect in a raid in the occupied West
Bank city of Ramallah.
The Shin Bet security service named him as 29-year-old Arafat Irfaiya from
Hebron.
Both the police and Shin Bet have said investigations have so far not found
conclusively whether the killing was a “terrorist attack” or from other
motives.
In the runup to Israel’s general election in April, however, politicians
and Israeli media appeared to have no such doubts on Sunday.
“I have no doubts about the nationalist motives of the murderer,” Public
Security Minister Gilad Erdan told public radio.
“After so many years of suffering from terror we should know – this is a
nationalist attack.”
Commenting on calls to execute Palestinian militant killers, Erdan said he
was in favour of applying the death penalty in certain circumstances.
“If it becomes clear that there is no possibility of rehabilitating the
murderer and that he abused his victim, in such cases capital punishment
should be applied,” he said.
“The time has come to employ the death penalty for terrorists, as the law
allows us to do,” the daily Maariv quoted MP Bezalel Smotrich of the far
right Jewish Home party as saying.
Despite a court gag order, Israeli social media were abuzz over the weekend
with what Yediot Aharonot newspaper called “graphic descriptions about the
alleged nature of the murder.”
Police called on the public not to share “publications and reports,
especially on social media, about the circumstances of the murder case –
including irresponsible horrific descriptions.”
“We hereby clarify that those are completely baseless publications,” police
said.
BSS/AFP/FI/ 1726 hrs